Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Here's the thing

It was never a penalty.

I'm not getting into the whole, "well, he earned it, didn't he?" argument either. I felt bad, and more than a little embarrassed when Eduardo went down. I'll admit, while I had those feelings and I recognized that the keeper, Boruc (who kinda scares me), definitely did well to keep his arms away, I thought that his thigh is what actually clipped Eduardo's foot and brought the penalty. That's when the embarrassment sat in. It seemed Eduardo made a meal of what I thought was actually a penalty.

Now, I recorded the match and watched it about six hours after the scheduled kickoff. Thinking in advance that I might want to see some comments from Sky Sports News, I recorded that as well. I just saw, in those highlights, yet another reply. It wasn't a penalty. And I say that with what is a less than begrudging admittance that I feel bad about Eduardo resorting to such tactics ... especially given how much I strive for and embrace the 'purity' of the game (as Jim so rightly noted in the Match Pricks Twitter feed earlier today).

Still ... What goes around comes around, you create your own fortune, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's football, isn't it? We've been on the bad end of that, we will be again and rest assured we'll be on the fortunate end of it again as well. At Match Pricks, we have a word to deal with this: Jintao-denfreude. You reap evil, you sew evil. It'll all come around. Doesn't make it right, but it'll all come around